1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention generally relates to the production of closures for openings and more particularly to an apparatus for sewing a succession of fabric pieces such as flypieces for trousers, panels of a one-piece dress or gores of a skirt to a continuous length of slide fastener chain.
2. Description of the prior art:
A typical apparatus for sewing a succession of flypieces to a continuous slide fastener chain is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,576,104 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,886. In these conventional apparatuses, a succession of flypieces are fed one after another horizontally along a guide table through feed rollers to an intermittently-operating sewing machine, while a continuous slide fastener chain is fed continuously to the sewing machine independent from the feeding of flypieces. The flypieces are then sewn to the continuous slide fastener chain by the sewing machine.
These conventional apparatuses suffer from the following drawbacks. The flypieces and the continuous slide fastener chain are fed independently from each other towards the sewing machine. Furthermore, the slide fastener chain is fed directly to beneath a presser foot and is forced thereby to overlap the flypiece, to thus press the flypiece against a support table, whereupon the flypiece is subjected to considerable frictional resistance. This is liable to preclude smooth and constant feeding of the flypieces. As a result, the flypieces may be sewn to the slide fastener chain at irregular intervals, thus forming an excessively wide unnecessary gap between a preceding flypiece and a succeeding flypiece. In the worst case, the sewing operation might stop.